Slobo buried, but can Serbia forget history? http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1455543.cms ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' The Dominion media analysis <http://dominionpaper.ca/media_analysis/> , by Dru Oja Jay Milosevic the Guilty? http://dominionpaper.ca/media_analysis/2006/03/17/milosevic_.html ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' http://dominionpaper.ca/media_analysis/2006/03/18/the_origin.html March 18, 2006
The Origins of the War in the Balkans Part two in a five part series on the former Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic isn't only charged with war crimes. The Globe's Doug Saunders says that Milosevic is "considered responsible for 250,000 deaths and the descent of the former Yugoslavia into terrible ethnic warfare." Though Saunders does not say who "considers" Milosevic responsible, he is certainly not the only commentator to repeat the claim. The media's failure to examine facts on the ground (or at least, their failure to tell their readers about them) extends beyond Milosevic himself to the entire history of Yugoslavia's civil war. Between 1960 and 1980, Yugoslavia--a federation consisting of multiple ethnic groups, including Albanians, Hungarians, Slovenes, Egyptians, Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats--was, by objective measures, a prosperous country. Economic growth was vigorous, all citizens had a guaranteed right to income, a month of paid vacation, and life expectancy was seventy-two years. The federation's many national and linguistic groups coexisted peacefully through a complex complex system of government spanning multiple languages and semiautonomous regions. As Michael Parenti writes in To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia--which documents the history of US and European intervention--Yugoslavian leaders committed a "disastrous error" in the 1970s: they borrowed money from the West. When western economies entered a recession, free trade principles gave way to economic self-preservation, and Yugoslavian exports were blocked, to devastating effect. Earlier borrowing brought with it the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which demanded that the economy be "restructured". This process, Parenti writes, included "wage freezes, the abolition of state subsidized prices, increased unemployment, elimination of most worker-managed enterprises, and massive cuts in social spending." According to the World Bank's figures, restructuring produced six hundred thousand layoffs in 1989-90 alone. Taking control of monetary policy by 1991, the IMF effectively broke Yugoslavia into pieces by preventing transfer payments to the republics (such as Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia) from the federal government and assigning debt to each of the member republics. Serbia, Parenti notes, was the most hostile to IMF "reforms", with 650,000 workers (joined, in many cases, by workers of other ethnicities in Serbia and other republics) engaging in "massive walkouts and protests". For Parenti and others, all available evidence points to a long term, deliberate campaign on the part of the US, Britain, and Germany (among others) to destabilize and divide the last socialist holdout in eastern Europe. Before the economic collapse, almost all observers agree that people from many ethnic backgrounds coexisted peacefully. The economic destruction of Yugoslavia, Parenti argues, caused different nationalities to "compete more furiously than ever for a share" of rapidly declining economic wealth. "Once the bloodletting starts, the cycle of vengeance and retribution takes on a momentum of its own." In 1990, the US threatened to cut off aid if Yugoslavia did not hold elections, but insisted that elections be held only in the republics, not at the federal level. In 1991, the European Community organized a conference on Yugoslavia, which called for its division into "sovereign and independent republics," at which point Yugoslavian representatives were barred from attending any more of the conference meetings. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has most recently called attention to itself by financing political groups that fomented military coups against elected governments in Haiti and Venezuela, was also involved in the Yugoslavian civil war and the ensuing conflict. Allan Weinstein, one of the NED's founders, was candid about the mission of the NED, which is funded directly by the US federal government. "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA," Weinstein said in 1991. According to research conducted by William Blum, a scholar of US interventions abroad, the NED described the mandate of its 1997-98 programs as aiming to "identify barriers to private sector development at the local and federal levels in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and to push for legislative change...[and] to develop strategies for private sector growth." Starting in 1988, the NED provided millions of dollars to "independent media", "opposition political parties", and "pro-democracy nongovernmental organizations", "student groups", "labour unions" and "think tanks" throughout the former Yugoslavia. According to testimony in Senate hearings, in the two years leading up to the Kosovo crisis, the US government provided $16.5 million for democracy promotion in Serbia alone, mostly through the NED. Proportional to population, and not accounting for lower pay scales, the equivalent amount of funding for Canadian media and political groupings would be roughly $46 million. A Milosevic-headed Serbian government did eventually pass legislation <http://www.vii.org/monroe/issue56/serbia.htm> that decreed that media could face steep fines for circulating false information, forcing US-sponsored newspapers and radio stations to move to Montenegro. The US, however, has even less tolerance for outside funding of its democracy. Senator John Kerry, for example, found himself the subject of a firestorm of media criticism when his 2004 presidential campaign accepted a $2,000 cheque from a private citizen of South Korea (not a government group). Kerry sent the cheque back and vowed to do more thorough "background checks" on campaign donors. The Canada Elections Act prohibits any groups that receives money from a foreign source from using it for "election advertising purposes". Canada also maintains extensive regulations preventing foreign ownership of the media. Are critics like Parenti and Blum right? How does their evidence stack up to that provided by Canadian media? This is difficult to say, because almost all news media in Canada and the US have ignored the role of the West in the demise of Yugoslavia and the United States' subsequent well-financed political interventions. "In the eyes of the global media," writes University of Ottawa economist Michel Chossudovsky, "Western powers bear no responsibility for the impoverishment and destruction of a nation of 24 million people." Instead, the prevailing view continues to be that the US, Canada, and other NATO powers acted benevolently to end the conflict. Meanwhile, the breakup continues. NED-funded political parties, currently governing in Serbia-Montenegro's autonomous province of Montenegro (and, since 2000, Serbia itself) are currently preparing for a referendum on secession. Further reading: » William Blum: Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy <http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/National%20EndowmentDemo.html> » Michel Chossudovsky: Dismantling Former Yugoslavia, Recolonising Bosnia <http://sarantakos.com/kosovo/ks3yugo.html> » Cathrin Schütz: The Militarism of German Foreign Policy and the Dismantling of a State <http://www.counterpunch.org/schutz06052004.html> » Jared Israel et alia: The Nuts & Bolts of a Scam... How the U.S. has Created a Corrupt Opposition in Serbia <http://www.tenc.net/analysis/scam.htm> » Post-Soviet Media Law and Policy: Media Law in Serbia-Montenegro <http://www.vii.org/monroe/issue56/serbia.htm> » James Ciment and Immanuel Ness: NED and the Empire's New Clothes <http://www.covertaction.org/content/view/100/75/> » George Szamuely: The National Evisceration of Democracy <http://www.antiwar.com/szamuely/sz-col.html> » US Senate Foreign Relations Committee: Prospects for Democracy in Yugoslavia <http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/hearin.htm> » Neil Clark: The spoils of another war <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,1309165,00.html> » Al Giordano: Do Foreign Governments Have a "Human Right" to Buy Venezuela Elections? <http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2005/7/9/113427/7207> » Elections Canada: Questions and Answers About Third Party Election Advertising <http://www.elections.ca/content.asp?section=pol&document=index&dir=thi/que&; lang=e&textonly=false> » Yves Engler: Market Famines and the IMF <http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=8494> """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" http://dominionpaper.ca/media_analysis/2006/03/19/the_media_.html March 19, 2006 The Media War Part three in a five-part series on the former Yugoslavia Extensive analysis and the public record has shown that during the series of civil wars that beset the former Yugoslavia, the Western news media provided coverage that was, by any objective standard, misleading and in many cases completely false. Recent media reports have simply stopped referring to mass graves and death camps where hundreds of thousands of people were--according to breathless TV, radio and newspaper reports during the war--systematically raped, tortured, and killed. Seven years later, little evidence supporting the conclusion that such vast atrocities took place has surfaced, though casual references to genocide and ethnic cleansing find themselves sharing a sentence with the name Milosevic. Evidence does show that tens of thousands of combatants and civilians died in the tragic decade-long conflict. Hundreds of thousands were displaced, forced to live in refugee camps. The silence of the same journalists that were scrambling to tell the world about genocide on the scale of "Hitler or Stalin" both leaves readers the impression that hundreds of thousands of innocents were in fact killed, and undermines the credibility of future reports of genocide. The media's collective credibility is further undermined by its ongoing silence about conflicts where hundreds of thousands of people are being killed, with western complicity or support: West Papua <http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php> and the Congo <http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat2.htm#Co98> , for example. George Kenney, who resigned from the US State Department in 1992 to protest the Bush administration's policies in the then-disintegrating Yugoslavia, wrote in 1996 that "much of the early war was fought not on the battlefield but through high-powered (and high-priced) lobbying firms." "Since late 1992 there has also been a splendidly effective volunteer army of journalists, think-tank analysts, Capitol Hill staff and administration hawks pushing the Bosnian, and secondarily Croatian, causes," wrote Kenney. The Yugoslavian civil war began when Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia and Macedonia seceded from Yugoslavia with US and European funding and encouragement. In the case of Croatia and Bosnia, significant Serb minorities insisted on autonomy or rejoining Yugoslavia, which was not consistent with the US-European plan. That in the case of Croatia, members of the Serb minority had their rights systematically violated by the US- and German-backed government also did not matter. In America, Kenney wrote, "it is almost impossible to be too anti-Serb." UN and NATO investigations have shown that military and paramilitary groups on all sides--and NATO, which dropped 20,000 tonnes of bombs on Serbia--committed atrocities. However, the record also shows that again and again, news media reported made-up atrocities attributed to Serb forces, while taking minimal interest in atrocities committed against Serbs. Evidence of crimes committed by Serbs sometimes turned out to be crimes perpetrated against Serbs, as was the case with BBC footage of a "Bosnian prisoner of war in a concentration camp" who was later identified as a Bosnian Serb in a Muslim detention camp. No evidence of Serbian "concentration camps" ever surfaced, though conditions in detention camps on all sides were predictably brutal. In other cases, unidentified bodies were attributed to untold Serb atrocities before being identified as belonging to a particular ethnic group or even as noncombatants. In a shocking number of cases, estimates of thousands of victims were reported where later only a few dozen bodies were found. The most striking example was State Department official David Scheffer's estimate--in the middle of the NATO bombing campaign--that "as many as 225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59 remain unaccounted for." The shocking estimate, reported widely in the media, was later reduced when the British government circulated an estimate that 10,000 were missing. A month later, NATO-led peacekeepers told the press that a total of 2,150 bodies had been found, of which 850 were civilians. It was evidence of war crimes, but of a significantly smaller scale than had been initially reported. The radical revision of estimates after the shocking headlines were several news cycles behind was exemplary of reporting during the war. In most cases, horrifying headlines attributed to "government sources"--often ones with an interest in a particular outcome--were followed up with obscure corrections. According to many sources, Bosnian Muslim leaders like President Izetbegovic were keenly aware of the impact of images of suffering on international public opinion. In the case of several high-profile massacres in Sarajevo that made headlines and rallied western support, for example, UN investigations later revealed that Bosnian Muslim forces had slaughtered their own people. Atrocities against Serbs went unreported or underreported, including villages burned to the ground, testimony (by victims, not unnamed government sources) describing gang rape by Croatian militias, and murderous attacks--killing hundreds of Serbian civilians--by Muslim forces stationed at Srebrenica prior to the massacre of hundreds of Muslims there by Serb forces. In the case of Srebrenica, the number of "over 8,000" missing Muslims is often cited, but the number of bodies found in a massive search of the area is under 3,000, as of last October. Only a fraction have been identified, and the bodies include soldiers and fighters on both sides killed in three years of war. One can be relatively certain that Serbian troops executed at least 153 prisoners of war in one case, which few will dispute is a horrific war crime. Evidence on the public record after extensive searches, however, does not support the much larger numbers or charges of genocide. This does not necessarily mean that larger atrocities did not take place, but simply that supporting evidence has not been found after a major investigation. Public relations firms played a key role in the disinformation around the war. Ruder Finn was one such firm, employed at various times by Croatia, Muslim Bosnia and the Albanian parliamentary opposition in Kosovo. In a notable exception to media orthodoxy, the National Post's Isabel Vincent reported in 1998: If the plight of Kosovo Albanians is today viewed around the world as an issue of self-determination for an oppressed minority group, then it is largely due to the efforts of former Ruder Finn executive James Harff, who almost single-handedly reduced a historically complex conflict to a black and white morality play, complete with oppressed good guys and bloodthirsty bad guys. In 1993, Harff told French journalist Jacques Morlino that he was "most proud" of Ruder Finn's successful bid to mobilize major Jewish organizations like the B'nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress. According to Morlino's transcript, Harff said that There was every reason then for Jewish intellectuals and organizations to be hostile to the Croats and Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse this state of things. And we succeeded in masterly fashion... The entry into the fray of Jewish organizations on the side of the Bosnians was an extraordinary move. All at once, we were able to make public opinion equate Serbs and Nazis. The dossier was complex, nobody understood what was going on in Bosnia... But in one stroke we were able to present a simple matter, a story with good guys and bad guys. We knew that the business would be played out on this terrain... All at once, there was a very clear change of language in the press with the employment of terms with a very strong emotive value, such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc., all evoking Nazi Germany, the gas chambers and Auschwitz. The emotive charge was so strong that no one could go against the dominant current, except on pain of being accused of revisionism. We hit the bull's eye. When Morlino pointed out that Harff didn't have any proof of claims circulated to media by Ruder Finn, Harff responded that "Our business is not to verify information. We're not equipped to do that. Our business... is to accelerate the circulation of information that is favorable to us... That's what we did. We didn't assert that there were death camps in Bosnia, we let it be known that Newsday asserted it." Pressed by Morlino, Harff insisted, "We're professionals. We had work to do and we did it. We're not paid to practice morality." Journalists, on the other hand, have taken great pains to point out that they practice morality. In this regard, their continued silence on the question of evidence--while repeating claims without any substantiation--is confusing. Further Reading: » Diana Johnstone: Srebrenica Revisited <http://www.counterpunch.org/johnstone10122005.html> » Source Watch: Ruder Finn's work for Croatia <http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ruder_Finn's_work_for_Croatia> » Partial transcript of James Harff's comments to Jacques Morlino <http://www.greens.org/s-r/20/20-24.html> » National Post: International Media Under Attack in Serbia <http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9811&L=twatch-l&D=1&F=P&O =D&P=20003> » George Kenney: Kosovo: On Ends and Means <http://www.thenation.com/doc/19991227/kenney> » George Kenney: Steering Clear of Balkan Shoals <http://listserv.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9811&L=twatch-l&D=1&F=P&O=D&P= 20746> » George Kenney: A Premature Death <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg08839.html> » Michael Parenti: The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia <http://www.michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html> » Michael Parenti: The Media and their Atrocities <http://www.michaelparenti.org/MediaAtrocities.html> » Michael Parenti: The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic <http://www.michaelparenti.org/Milosevic.html> » Ruder Finn: Official Site <http://www.ruderfinn.com/default.asp?bhcp=1> Serbian News Network - SNN [email protected] http://www.antic.org/
